Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo - Merom Debuts


PCMark05 - General Usage Performance

Futuremark's PCMark05 offers a quick-take benchmark analysis with various standard day-to-day computing usage models.  The following is a quote directly from Futuremark that explains exactly what these tests do and how they work.

General Usage Performance: PCMark05
Compression, Decompression, Text Search etc...

"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.


As we noted, our Mobile Core 2 Duo T7600 Merom chip has roughly an 8% clock speed advantage over our T2600 Core Duo Yonah chip.  However, in terms of raw CPU throughput, PCMark05's CPU test module shows a 17%+ advantage for Core 2 Duo T7600 at 2.33GHz. 


"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing." - Courtesy FutureMark Corp. 

PCMark05's Memory subsystem test shows roughly a 35% advantage for the Core 2 Duo T7600 Merom processor versus the fastest Yonah Core Duo chip on the market.  This is undoubtedly attributed to the chip's additional 2MB of on board cache, more advanced pre-fetch algorithms that Intel's dubs "Smart Memory Access", and the shared-memory cache architecture dubbed "Smart Cache" that is employed in Merom as well as its brethren Conroe desktop chip.


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